The Atlantic has bitten into the island's neck like a stoat,

and will in time consume it all.  

Aran is a dying moment.

Tim Robinson, Stones of Aran: Pilgrimage, 1986

How then does light return to the world after the eclipse of the sun? Miraculously. Frailly. In thin stripes. It hangs like a glass cage. It is a hoop to be fractured by a tiny jar. There is a spark there. Next moment a flush of dun. Then a vapour as if earth were breathing in and out, once, twice, for the first time. Then under the dullness someone walks with a green light. Then off twists a white wraith. The woods throb blue and green, and gradually the fields drink in red, gold, brown. Suddenly a river snatches a blue light. The earth absorbs colour like a sponge slowly drinking water. It puts on weight; rounds itself; hangs pendent; settles and swings beneath our feet.

Virginia Woolf, The Waves, 1931

We can walk between two places and in so doing establish a link between them, bring them into a warmth of contact, like introducing two friends

Thomas A Clark, In Praise of Walking, 2016

We were picking apart a problem in linguistic history and, as it were, examining close up the peak period of glory in the history of a language; in minuets we had traced the path which had taken it several centuries. And I was powerfully gripped by the vision of transitoriness: the way before our eyes such a complex, ancient, venerable organism, slowly built up over many generations, reaches its highest point, which already contains the germ of decay, and the whole intelligently articulated structure begins to droop, to degenerate, to totter towards its doom.

Hermann Hesse, The Glass Bead Game, 1943

Each of us, I suspect, cherishes a particular landscape that outwardly reflects some all-too-invisible condition within.

Its very topography gives colour, contour, dimension to otherwise inaccessible areas of inner reality. Endows them with palpable configuration.

Gustaf Sobin, Luminous Debris, 1997

"Beautiful with a hint of secrecy which haunts it, as the memory of a dark and tender sadness clouds the brilliance of a summer day."

Lilias Rider Haggard, A Norfolk Notebook, 1946

Do not allow yourself to be misled by the surfaces of things.

Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet, 1929

passage is now available to pre-order from another place press

Introductory essay by Alison Morris

all royalties from the book will be donated to the Anaphylaxis Campaign,

a UK charity who raise awareness of, and support people at risk of severe allergies.